Prepping for the zombie apocalypse, the alien invasion, or rising sea levels–aka, the prophecy known as WATERWORLD?
This is the vehicle you’re looking for, because anything powered by guzzleline or electricity will quickly stop being a thing. It will never run out of power because it’s powered by YOU.
And yes, this calls back to my first post ever. It’s called nostalgia, or a remix, and all the hip artists do this when they’re not busy dropping diss tracks all over Drake’s noggin.
Back to the mountain bike: this is what you want, because it’s a Minnesota Framed 2.0 Fat Tire monster, which laughs at mud, snow, gravel, or sand. Try to take one of those carbon-fiber racing bikes with itty bitty thin tires through some mud, snow, or anything other than a smooth road. See how well each $5,000 wheel performs. Yeah, singular. Each wheel is $5k.
You could buy one of these Minnesota fat tire bikes for all your friends for the price of that racing bike. Plus a used Honda Civic and enough left over cash to take the whole crew to Chipotle and get your burritos on.
Bike nerds will want to details, while preppers want to know how tough this thing is.
Here we go on both counts.
Bike nerds
This thing has 26″ wheels, and you also probably want to know how many gears it has. This many.
And it has Tiny Little Helper Gears in the back that do some kind of technical support job.
(Yes, those are derailers, but that sounds pornographic, I’m not calling them by that name. They are hereby and forever Tiny Little Helper Gears.)
As for brakes, these aren’t those rubber breaks that squeak, or the “brakes” on your first bike where you just went backwards on the pedal and somehow that stopped the bike. No. These are fancy disc brakes made of unobtanium and they work 5 bazillion times better than the rubber squeaky nonsense.
Preppers
This sucker isn’t build Ford tough. It’s far tougher than that, and sturdy as hell. The frame is aluminum, so it won’t rust and is lighter than steel, but not silly like carbon fiber, which would be impossible to fix during any flavor of apocalypse. What are you gonna do, hop on down to the carbon fiber store and ask the zombie clerk to hook you up?
Aluminum is common. Pick up some Diet Coke cans on the side of the road, cook those things, and smelt yourself some molten aluminum. Go wild.
Condition: Like new. As in, I only rode this a half-dozen times. Did not abuse it, crash it, or set up a wooden ramp to see how much air I could get before getting a compound fracture.
Price
$400 or best offer, and I’ll take U.S. dollars, euros, or rupees. Will also consider trades for a Tikka 3X in 6.5mm Creedmoor or a pallet of machetes.
Are you worthy?
Post a comment here or click on the Get in Touch tab for the emails and such. I’m putting this on Facebook Marketplace, too, whatever that is, mostly to see how many people lowball me by offering $200 or attempting trades involving a broken Xbox and a saggy couch they found on the side of the road.
Yes, you could write about 17 massive problems with this film, or 99 reasons I will never get these two hours of my life back.
HOWEVER: I want to focus on three actual storytelling lessons.
For educational purposes and such.
But hey, we will still make fun of this stinker.
HOLE NUMBER ONE: Our rebel heroine
Zack Snyder wants this to be Star Wars, so let’s get into the structural trouble at the crumbling foundation of this passion project.
Luke Skywalker starts out as a farmer, an orphan. So does this character.
After that, nothing is the same.
Luke has a secret Jedi pedigree, but he isn’t secretly a master warrior. It takes him three freaking movies, and a ton of training from two different mentors, to improve and improve before he starts kicking butt. Luke has to suffer and sacrifice.
He nearly dies a zillion times and gets his hand lopped off by Vader in the second film. He would have failed and died in the third film, except Daddy Vader switches sides.
Luke also learns a number of cool skills, and it takes time for him to master them. Fighting with a lightsaber. Force pull or whatever. Force jumping. All kinds of force stuff. It works as storytelling. You buy into it.
REBEL MOON makes the opposite choice. Our heroine randomly takes out an entire squad of baddies. Afterward, we get a flashback explaining how she’s a super warrior. Uh, no.
Yes, it’s a cool fight scene. There’s simply no setup to this payoff.
Then she kills the bad guy in the first movie, her first try, only for him to get un-Palpatined in a Bantha tank or whatever.
No mentor, no practicing, no suffering, no losses, no growth. This heroine starts out as a badass and ends the movie as a badass. That makes for a flat, boring arc.
HOLE NUMBER TWO: Our lame villain
This movie is trying to be Star Wars, which features maybe the most iconic villain of all time, the towering and powerful Darth Vader.
And they go with a skinny man with a British accent, a thing for tentacle porn, and the worst haircut in the galaxy.
Darth Vader wielded a scary red lightsaber and force-choked generals who annoyed him.
This villain has a walking stick. OMGWTFBBQ.
HOLE NUMBER THREE: Seven million sidekicks
Yes, this movie copies Star Wars, but it’s also trying to copy Seven Samurai, so we have all kinds of extra characters taking up all kinds of screen time.
None of them are essential. Seriously.
What we needed was a mentor, an Obi-Wan figure, to help our heroine learn and grow. Because she’s already amazing, there’s no room for that.
Therefore we get random characters who add nothing. A farmer who follows her on the journey. A rebel leader who only shows up and dies in order for her to assume that role. Bare Chested Beastmaster, a rogue spaceship pilot, a samurai woman with glowing red These Are Not Lightsabers, and so forth.
All forgettable and unnecessary. The one you could argue for needing is Rogue Spaceship Pilot, who is not Hans Solo but more of a Lando because he betrays them to the Empire or whatever.
The only side character who resonated, and should not get ripped from the script, is the robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins–and this character gets built up in the beginning, abandoned, and cameo’d at the end.
Honestly, the easiest way to fix the structural problems is to strip away all the side characters.
Send a real farmer girl, with no skills, with Anthony Hopkins as her Robot Obi-wan.
Have him teach her to fight, and hide, and sabotage the bad guys. Have her suffer and lose and learn.
Give her and the robot interesting weapons and powers other than “she just kicks ass.”
BOTTOM LINE
Huge budget. All kinds of special effects and possibilities. It all goes to waste because the heroine, villain, and story don’t work. 0/10, spend the sequel money on SHIMMER LAKE PART 2: GIVE THIS TOWN A BATH.
The business of music–and movies, books, plays, and all other art–has always been rather upside down when it comes to artists getting a decent share of the monies so they can, I don’t know, pay the rent.
And it’s no secret that musicians have had a rough time lately, just like other creative types, with people no longer paying cash monies to download mp3’s after they stopped swiping their debit cards for CD’s and cassette tapes and eight-tracks and vinyl. Yes, some hipster types still buy vinyl. Just not nearly not enough to support bands.
So musicians, big or small, rely on selling tickets to live shows along with T-shirts and other merch. If they are famous, and lucky, they get decent money from streaming sites.
Might be a musical revolution
Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are both going in a different, smarter direction with concert movies.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Movie snagged $128 million million in it’s opening weekend. Not week, weekend. AMC alone said it got $100 million in advance ticket sales. This thing will break all kinds of records.
Beyoncé might go on and break the new records. It could get huge.
Why this is brilliant economics and marketing
Concert movies or documentaries aren’t completely new. The size and impact of these two movies, though, will shake up everything.
What’s hilarious is I doubt the expenses are that high. If you’re already putting on a concert, with lights and roadies and backup singers and musicians and dancers–it is not that much extra cost to hire professionals to film during the show and behind the scenes. It’s not much more money to hire a director and editors to go through all that footage to shape the best movie.
Shooting a movie from scratch, now, costs a mountain of cash. A single Marvel movie can run $200 million to $300 million. Or almost double, if you add in marketing. Nobody understands Hollywood accounting, not even Hollywood.
One music video can run up millions on the tab, since you’re also starting from scratch and need dancers, sets, and days to shoot it.
The numbers aren’t all in yet. But I would bet every dollar in my pocket, and yours, that the return on investment for Taylor’s movie and Beyoncé’s film will both be absolutely bonkers.
These two mega-movies will also boost the health of AMC’s stock, causing millions of redditors to lose their minds, refinance their mortgage to buy more stock, and get divorced when their spouse does not understand why their life’s savings got lost on some kind of NASA-related quest to “go to the moon.” Pro-tip: do not do this.
Will this be a trend? Yes, yes, and yes
So yes, this can and should start a trend.
I am only a casual fan of Taylor and Beyoncé, and would never spend a day & night driving to Seattle or Portland to shell out $300 or $500 to see a live concert plus more cash for a hotel because I would not make it home until oh-dark-thirty along with dinner and breakfast and all the things.
Yet I would happily, happily spend $19.89 (symbolic and funny, very nice, Taylor) to pop down to a local theater and watch the concert movie. Absolutely.
And the same would be true for at least 50 other bands, big or small, that I adore.
Can it scale down to smaller bands?
Absolutely. Medium-popular bands could easily spend a lot less and still come out with a cool concert movie.
Even local bands could pull this off. A band in my backyard keeps cranking out great music videos on a shoestring. Love them.
I’d much rather pay to watch a concert movie in a theater than wait around for a band to get close enough for me to drive or fly and see them.
Honestly, I’ve seen fewer and fewer movies in theaters lately after coming down with Superhero Movie Fatigue.
It would be seven separate flavors of awesomesauce to see a hot trend of new concert movies coming to our theaters, week after week. Bring it. I will buy popcorn.
I had a blast talking to bestsellers Meg Gardiner, Bob Mayer, and Christopher Farnsworth about this–and they did not hold back. Great authors and a great conversation.
Also: my apologies for not posting lately. I try not to make this blog personal at all, but it’s been a long year with a death in the family, and am just now getting back to writing for fun aside from the day job.
Also-also: while I love the Twitter, it feels like Elon Musk is in a race to see how fast he can destroy the thing, so you can also find me on bluesky @speechwriterguy.bsky.social
I hope you all are well and I’ll get back to talking smack about books and movies while making fun of music videos.
Listen: it’s hard enough to make it as a rock star, or any sort of musician. So props to Vince Neil for becoming a star in the first place.
HOWEVER: it is a sin against the rock gods, and possibly a class B felony, to sell concert tickets that cost as much as the average American’s mortgage when you are (a) entirely too trashed to sing, (b) unable to sing without a killer team of audio engineers in the studio, or (c) too lazy to memorize the lyrics to a song you’ve been singing for, I don’t know, 30 years.
Here’s a video of the crime in progress:
So yeah, Bad Lip Reading wouldn’t touch this, since it’d be like a 300-pound defensive end for the Seahawks hopping into a Pee Wee Football game. There’s no challenge.
Here’s the original, so you know that actual lyrics to this song DO exist.
And yeah, the lyrics are not insanely hard to remember.
THE ACTUAL LYRICS
Lyrics from azlyrics.com, which is like the musical oracle to me:
KICKSTART MY HEART by Motley Crue
When I get high I get high on speed Top fuel funny car’s A drug for me My heart, my heart Kickstart my heart Always got the cops Coming after me Custom built bike doing 103 My heart, my heart Kickstart my heart
Ooh, are you ready girls? Ooh, are you ready now? Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Give it a start Whoa, yeah, baby
Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Hope it never stops Whoa, yeah, baby Yeah
Skydive naked From an aeroplane Or a lady with a Body from outer space My heart, my heart Kickstart my heart Say I got trouble Trouble in my eyes I’m just looking for another good time My heart, my heart Kickstart my heart
Yeah, are you ready girls? Yeah, are you ready now?
Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Give it a start Whoa, yeah, baby Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Hope it never stops Whoa, yeah, baby
Kickstart my heart
When we started this band All we needed, needed was a laugh Years gone by… I’d say we’ve kicked some ass When I’m enraged Or hittin’ the stage Adrenaline rushing Through my veins And I’d say we’re still kickin’ ass
I said, ooh, ah Kickstart my heart Hope it never stops And to think, we did all of this to rock
Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Give it a start Whoa, yeah, baby Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Hope it never stops Whoa, yeah, baby
Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Hope it never stops Whoa, yeah, baby
Whoa, yeah Kickstart my heart Give it a start Okay, boys, let’s rock the house
That’s all
Kickstart my heart
VERDICT
Listen, I get it that everybody’s got bills to pay: alimony, child support, rehab, attorneys, bail, a team of hairdressers, PR folks, agents, roadies, dealers. Some of those folks are expensive.
And I understand the life cycle of a rock band involves starting out playing birthday keggers and living in the van until you get that one break and a hit song and maybe a killer album and a serious concert tour and piles of cash and a lead singer who thinks he’s better than the band and a band that breaks up and a solo career that goes nowhere and a bunch of middle-aged dudes who need to pay the mortgage and that’s why they’re playing at your county fair. I’ve seen VH1: BEHIND THE MUSIC.
But I also understand that life has second acts, and sometimes third acts. Professional athletes not named Tom Brady often understand this. Your average NFL career lasts three years. Three. So smart pro athletes, rock stars, actors, and other famous peoples save their pennies, invest those pennies, and plan for a second career when they inevitably get hurt or too old for this stuff.
Vince Neil is too old for this stuff. He’s not the science experiment known as Keith Richards, who can never die. As a human being, he needs to consider other ways to make money, or find meaning, aside from grabbing the microphone and disgracing the memory of songs that fans would like to remember in a better way.
But maybe the money is too good. Dunno. Not buying a ticket.
Listen: this silly blog started when I needed to sell the Epic Black Car, then romance authors and readers found that post—and you rock, all of you. What is up with your bad selves?
Later, I needed to hock The Nikon of Infinite Beauty. However: Today is different. See, we packed up and moved out while contractors went wild with hammers and power tools. Now we’re back in but still unpacking boxes, which in America are not allowed to be opened until they’ve been seasoned in your garage or basement for at least seven years.
I am therefore finding a mountain of things to sell, give away, or offer up to anybody passing by as I walk Ruthie, the Friendliest Dog in the World, who lays on the street to show skittish dogs that she is Friend and tried to do this to my neighbor’s red pickup truck, which did not reciprocate. But that’s cool, Ruthie still wants to play with the Shiny Red Truck.
Also, this is only the first batch. There will be more. Help me get my Marie Kondo on.
PLANT DECAPITATOR
I have used weed-whackers, which have little strings that keep breaking, especially when you try to attack a nasty armored weed. Weed-whackers are not my favorite.
This thing, now, doesn’t mess around with plastic strings. This is a Ryobi BC30 with an invincible steel blade. It stands against the garage drinking Mad Dog 20/20’s until the weed-whackers run out of string, then it saunters down to absolutely destroy any sort of unwanted vegetation, be it blackberries or scotch broom.
Scotch broom is the Devil and the reason I own the Vorpal Two-Handed Machete, which also likes to cut down trees and does a better job of it than Mr. Axe, who supposedly specializes in trees and only trees. Mr. Axe, you have been eclipsed and made redundant. Sorry.
Condition: Gently pre-owned.
Price: $40 or a bottle of sake. Yes, you can get good bottles of sake at Trader Joe’s for like $10, and that feels like a cheat code. Cheat away. I like sake.
ROTATING METAL TEETH OF DEATH
This is a gas-powered instrument of destruction, commonly used by jugglers who have lost the plot and get the idea that “Hey, keeping eight balls in the air is difficult and all, but what would really impress the ladies and fill up my tips can would be throwing at chain saw in there. And what if I set this thing on fire?”
Artists also use this Stihl MS 170’s like this to delicately turn blocks of ice into dragons and such for weddings or whatever, or to transform blocks of wood into friendly bears that guard your driveway.
Carhartt People have been known to grab these things and attack trees, who with their dying Ent breath try very hard to fall on those who attack them or nearby Ford F-150’s that cost more than our first house. Do not mess with people wearing striped shirts and doubly-reinforced jeans.
Condition: New, never been used. I believe these things cost $300-something new.
Price: If you are a juggler, $5,938 and proof of current health insurance. Yes, that price is stupid, and so is lighting death machines on fire and juggling with them. For everybody else, $100 or two bottles of bourbon.
PONDERING SURFACE
You can’t think deep thoughts while driving, running, or eating. But you have to remember all those glorious ideas until you have the chance to sit down at desk like this to write them down.
How you write them is up to you, artistic person. Maybe you plop down the laptop, one-finger an old Underwood, or go wild with a fountain pen. I don’t care if you use this to knit hats for cats–you need a surface to get your groove on like it’s a roller rink in 1976 and Rick James is on full blast.
Condition: Good, and not chewed up by puppies at all. Now, this is a utilitarian desk, something we probably bought at Fred Meyer, assembled, and painted blue. It looks fine, but it’s not some solid-wood heirloom to pass down to your kids.
Price: Free. Want to give it a home? Take it. If taking free things make your tummy feel funny, throw me a tiny airport-sized bottle of tequila.
Note: Now, the natural question is, don’t you need something to sit on, because otherwise a desk is kinda useless? Yes. The good news is you probably have a chair or three already. Desks like this and standard chairs go together just fine. It would be crazy to expect me to also have a handy chair to go with your new blue Desk of Deep Thoughts.
CHAIR
A trendy mesh chair, bit too small for a tall Swede like me. I like old-fashioned chair with leather. The picture above is the same chair, but new. Saw it in the store and took a shot.
Condition: The corner of the right arm looks like it got chewed by a puppy. Otherwise, good.
Price: Give me a number, or a puppy that doesn’t chew things, or three gray kittens with bright blue eyes.
Note: Now you’re gonna ask for a laptop. Bahahahaha no, I am not Santa Claus or some kind of genie trapped in a lamp.
HP LAPTOP
Do you have a lap, or a spiffy blue pondering surface that’s empty and lonely?
Stick this thing on there. Mash the power button and see the glory of Windows 10 or whatever. Watch as Microsoft tells you a bunch of times that this laptop may have six gigs of RAM but does not have the secret technology to run Windows 11. Connect to the series of tubes via this magic called “wifi,” which kinda looks like “wife” when you glance at it. Not even close. Wives are different and special and not for sale, barter, or trade. They pick you, dummy.
Fire up the internets and download OpenOffice, because I’m not leaving my copy of Office on this thing. Get paint.net and other stuff without paying a dime.
Go wild with your creative self. Write a short story about a lonely widow in Kansas who finds a purpose in life and a family of sorts after she starts a biker gang at the nursing home, except their bikes are souped-up Little Rascals, and their first crime spree is a mistake when Harold decides they should rob a bank, and because he’s hungry he picks the Food Bank, where the staff happily help them load up and ride off at full speed, thinking the cops will be right behind them.
Write the spec movie script COCAINE BEAR VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS ALIEN, but don’t hit send on that sucker until after the writer’s strike is over, because no, AI cannot write shows and movies and novels, and Hollywood execs living in mansions need to stop giving writers crumbs and realize there is no movie business without dorky writers with dorky haircuts who have brains seventeen times bigger than theirs.
Price: It’s an old laptop that still works fine. Hell if I know what that’s worth on the free market. Let’s say 10 medium-sized avocados.
Note: Now you’ll expect art lessons or a camera, and I am sorry, this is not happening, I am not a department store named Guy’s Warehouse of Power Tools and Random Stuff.
TWO DIGITAL CAMERAS
When I first took my own shots at Papers of News, we had 35 mm film cameras that came in rolls of 24 shots, which went down to 12 shots once the papers got into financial trouble by stupidly going deep into debt to buy smaller papers that they then shut down. Brilliant! This is why the global list of the world’s billionaires is chock full of former newspaper executivies.
With these two digital cameras, there’s not need to worry about only having 12 shots. Machine gun it, because every frame of film costs dollars while digital is free free free.
These are little cameras, the kind you stick in your pocket. Can your iPhone take better photos? Probably. Can you give these things to two kids who need to turn off the screens and go outside to take shots of bees in flowers and deer poop and extreme closeups of a chocolate lab’s nose? Yes. You can do that. Totally recommended. Because little kids will only lose or break iPhones, where if they lose or break one of these things, meh.
Price: Close your eyes, reach into your wallet, and throw two random bills at me. Has to be random, no cheating. Does a one feel that different from a twenty or a fifty? Does anybody have fifties in their wallet these days? Doubt it. Haven’t seen one in forever.
Note: Cameras are window to the world. Every kid and adult should shoot photos to find out what they see as beautiful and share that beauty with others.
DETAILS FOR ALL ITEMS
Shipping and handling: Just like Amazon, I offer free shipping if you are Prime member, except I haven’t started giving out Prime memberships to anybody yet, so we’re not shipping anything, especially heavy thing like chainsaws and big bulky things like desks or long-ass machines like plant decapitators.
Pickup or delivery: I will deliver any or all of these items to anyone in the continental United States. Not kidding for once! Just pay mileage (0.655 per mile, standard federal rate) and meals (not Burger King, can’t do it) along with lodging. To be fancy, we go all Latin call all those things per diem. I will blog my way along I-90 to Missouri or whatever, where we will eat ghost peppers at a biker bar in between shots of cheap tequila before you return to the yacht club to brag about sending a speechwriter on a giant road trip to hand-deliver a $20 desk.
Other items: The other 498 bins in the garage and basement are what J.J. Abrams like to call mystery boxes, as in, it takes me two hours in a dark room to figure out what’s inside all of them, and popcorn is optional.
Making a trade or purchase: If you want any of this stuff, or have a request—Blue Ray or VHS movies! a single 3.5″ disk!t—hit me up in the comments or on the Twitters @speechwriterguy, because it’s probably in one of these boxes.
This is another in a series of conversations with Tyler B., lead singer and bass player of the punk band ONE PUMP LOTUS.
RED PEN: You said there’s another batch of music you discovered. Tell me about it.
TYLER: Riding back from the last gig in the van, and standing in the rain while we tried to fix the alternator, we drilled down on about the least rocking instrument on the planet. The lamest of the lame. What’s your champion?
RED PEN: The accordion, all the way.
TYLER: Nah, you can, like, embrace the cheesiness of the accordion. I’m talking about xylophone, the absolute top of the mountain for shit you can’t play in a rock band. I mean, two-year-olds grab tiny drummer sticks and smash on those things. So I went looking for bands that figured out how to make the xylophone absolutely bang, which should be impossible.
RED PEN: Show me what you found.
TYLER: I didn’t dig up just one of these unicorns. I have four of these suckers. Four, man. Alright, first up is the Violent Femmes, who went wild with the xylo on GONE DADDY GONE.
TYLER: Second song is Gotye, which I can’t spell or pronounce, so you’ll have to google that or ask ChatGPT to make up a story or whatever. And you know the song. It’s the one you play after a bad breakup to really swim around in a puddle of pity, then you play I WILL SURVIVE by Cake to get jacked up and ready to hit a gig and find somebody cool at the after party.
TYLER: Third song is all synth and xylo, and it’s the one you put on repeat at 4:20 when you need to mellow out for an hour. Because if you aren’t calmed down, or asleep, then you’re on something stronger than caffeine and need to get straight.
TYLER: Last song, and the absolute best Banger with Xylophones, is CRUEL SUMMER by Bananarama–did I say that right?
RED PEN: I hope so. Spell-check cannot help us with pronunciation and ChatGPT will tell us that Bananarama is what happened when the The Gap merged with Banana Republic.
TYLER: All that is over my head. Okay, what makes this even sweeter is this is the big song from THE KARATE KID, the original back when my mom was like twelve, not the remake with kung fu and Jackie Chan that sucked. I mean, Jackie Chan is cool, but how do you spend like a hundred million dollars on a movie that’s a remake of something perfect and pack it full of kung fu–in China–and call it THE KARATE KID? The studio execs who said yes to that thing were doing way too much blow.
So back to the song, which doesn’t just include xylophones as a backing instrument, or ease into them. Nah, they went hard core xylos right off, like they hooked up the biggest amplifiers on the planet to those things, and kept on hitting you with wave after wave of xylos like it’s a musical battering ram. You gotta love it.
RED PEN: Are you incorporating this into your music somehow?
TYLER: Oh yeah. We got this new song that totally integrates xylos with thrashing guitars and booming drums. I’m like totally training on this set we got at Goodwill and Tyler A. swears his uncle knows how to hook those things up to our spare amplifier.
These two shows both have a great leading actor, talented supporting case, and an interesting mystery/thriller premise.
So why did Daniel Crag & Co. entertain us so well with a sequel better than the original–and why did Giancarlo Esposito & Friends fail to satisfy?
And yes, I’m going to spoil the hell out of one of them, but not the other, because you should still go watch Daniel Craig having the most fun in his acting life.
First up: GLASS ONION.
This movie is a disguised mystery, with the real murder not revealed until halfway through the movie after ANOTHER murder to cover help the first.
The movie then starts over from another POV, and the clues start to make sense.
What GLASS ONION does so well is give the audience the emotion it wants in surprising ways.
And aside from the first murder victim, every character gets basically what the deserve, especially the villain.
GLASS ONION also happily passes my acid test: would I watch this movie again? YES.
All the ways KALEIDOSCOPE crashes and burns
Here’s the trailer if you are not familiar.
So the premise is interesting, and the episodes are shown to you in random order–except the end, where you watch the characters six months after the heist, then see the heist itself.
The ending is where it all falls apart.
I enjoyed the episodes leading up to the final two. Great acting with interesting, flawed characters put into tough situations.
Here’s why the ending kills a promising start: This is a heist movie, where the audience expects the heist go wrong before it surprisingly goes right due to the cleverness of the gang. OCEANS 11 is a great example of the genre.
Instead, our main character, Leo, doesn’t pull off the heist. They break into the impossible vault and think they stole the money only to get fooled. He fails, though he does successfully set up his rival for a long prison term. But that rival gives a disgruntled gang member, Bob, the info he needs to track down Leo and his bent lawyer girlfriend. She gets killed, then Leo is later shot in the back.
The ending is sending a message that greed doesn’t pay, and criminals end up dead or in prison.
Except it’s the wrong genre and setup for that kind of ending. That’s not a heist movie where the main character is the leader of the gang pulling off the job. Stories with this ending and message rightfully have the POV of law enforcement.
It’s true that this sort of ending happens in BREAKING BAD, with Walter White dying at the end. But he’s the villain of his own story, and his downfall is deserved. Walter White chose to go down a bad path that led to the destruction of his family and the death of dozens and dozens of people.
Leo is a sympathetic character, not a killer. Despite the mistakes of his criminal past, he’s kind to his team and his daughter.
So the second-to-last episode loses the audience and kills any desire to see how the heist fails.
It wouldn’t be hard to fix this. A heist story needs to end with a successful heist, and switching the bearer bonds is a neat trick.
Let the bent lawyer with a gun fetish win her gunfight with Bob’s thug, and let Leo live to push his granddaughter around in a stroller.
Most importantly, make the heist in this heist story truly work. Instead of Leo’s daughter switching the bonds to benefit the crooked Triplet billionaires, swap the bonds and wheel them out to share the spoils with Leo and the surviving gang, except for Bob, because screw Bob.
Now we have a heist story about a real heist, one that worked, that gives the audience the emotion it expects in an unexpected way.
This is the second in a series of musical conversations with Tyler B.. lead singer and bass player for the punk band ONE PUMP LOTUS.
RED PEN: What song led you down this path of musical discovery you’re calling Badass Acoustic?
TYLER: Just listen to this, okay? It killed me. (Tyler pulls up the following clip on his phone.)
Here’s why I was feeling this one so much: most songs, they’re overproduced, with a fat wall of sound from start to finish.
This song starts off with the singer and the guitar, boom, that’s it. Gritty and raw. Only later do they layer on other instruments, and when the drums kick in, my God, it just hits you.
RED PEN: This band is listed as country in some places, and others call them indie or folk. Why are you coming up with this other label?
TYLER: Because I don’t recognize the power of the media, or the Man, to dictate how you and I talk about music.
And I can tell you this isn’t country, while indie makes me think of politics or people doing their own thing in general–writing books, making art, whatever. Indie could be a local death metal band that doesn’t have a record deal and dresses up in dinosaur costumes. Doesn’t tell you a damned thing about the music, right?
If I tell you it’s Badass Acoustic, there’s no confusion whatsoever.
And this way, you can encompass a lot of music without pigeonholing people. When my uncle Harry passed, we found all these weird plastic things with tapes inside them, and if you shove them into this Pinto that Madison drives, a freaking relic, music still comes out, so we kept popping plastic deals in there and finding Badass Acoustic treasures like big tsunamis by Tori–wait, that’s wrong. Hold it, Little Earthquakes is the album, here we go.
I mean, that album is angry and creative and musical gold. I guess you could pigeonhole her into some kinda genre like Angry Piano Girl, but that’s limiting would things for no reason. Don’t care if it’s a piano, a guitar, or a freaking lute, if the band is mostly acoustic and has that vibe, we’re talking Badass Acoustic.
RED PEN: Why does this music appeal to you so much?
TYLER: It’s like the books and movies I like to watch versus the ones I quit after five minutes. If the whole thing is happy and perfect, or completely predictable, what’s the point?
Don’t give me your standard pop song “baby baby” lyrics or somebody rapping about how cool and successful they are and how many Lambos are in their garage. Give me something that’s interesting and tough and real. A song where somebody’s struggling to get through the day, or to live with their mistakes. A show about a villain who’s bad and can’t change, and there’s no Hollywood ending. Take me someplace that’s raw and emotional and not perfect at all.
That’s what I like about Badass Acoustic, and why we’re experimenting with a new acoustic track. Does this mean learning more than three chords? Yeah, it does. But there’s a freedom in stripping things down and putting that volume knob at three instead of eleven. The audience can hear all my words and when we do add drums, and a secret instrument I can’t talk about, the whole thing builds and builds in a special way.
RED PEN: What’s next for ONE PUMP LOTUS?
TYLER: If we make enough money in these next two gigs, we can pay for a new tranny on the van, and then we’re saving up for some serious studio time to cut the tracks, “White Coffee” and “Decaf.”
Yes, every movie and TV show can now afford to use CGI, which they do. Way too much.
And you can’t watch a Marvel or DC movie without noticing how every frame is packed to the gills with CGI: fake set, fake hero suits, fake explosions, and fake fights.
The fake fights are what kill me.
Every action film and superhero movie is required to end in a final brawl, hero vs. villain. Usually at night and in the rain. Hey, I don’t make the laws.
Here’s the thing: these fights are the absolute climax of these movies. If you nail them, the whole movie works. Screw them up and the audience remembers forever.
I loved the hell out of BLACK PANTHER, but couldn’t buy the cartoonish final fight, which made me feel nothing.
The scene right after, with real human actors doing this thing called acting, generated tons of emotion.
This is an old problem. Way back, THE MATRIX looked revolutionary, and every fight felt real. In the horrible sequels, they poured all kinds of money and effort and CGI into fights that should have been epic yet looked like cut-scenes from a video game.
Here is an old-fashioned final battle that completely avoids CGI and completely works. It also avoids the modern problem of blurry action with a camera that never stops moving. You can see the whole fight and it’s glorious.
And I’ll end with the best fight from a Marvel movie, one that’s very real and human that makes you think Sebastian Stan is the baddest man on the planet.
VERDICT: Save a few million and step away from the CGI, directors. Hire fight choreographers and film real fights with real human beings. Because that’s how you generate real human emotions.
The Red Pen of Doom 